Barry Lewis: All the stories help keep my Mom's memory alive

My mom used to say to me, "If you don't have time to see me when I'm alive — don't bother when I'm dead."

Barry Lewis

My mom used to say to me, "If you don't have time to see me when I'm alive — don't bother when I'm dead."

It was classic Roz Lewis.

She'd stab me with that dagger and twist it around a few times if I failed to make it down to Brooklyn on special occasions.

Like her birthday. My birthday. The boys' birthdays. The holidays. Or anything more than two weeks.

I'd share this story with colleagues and reminisce about Mom's culinary prowess.

She'd serve us ketchup instead of spaghetti sauce on pasta because it was one less pot to wash and she didn't need to be bothered. Breakfast was cold cereal. Dinners were often the frozen TV kind. Dessert was fresh from an Entenmann's box.

The woman was into the cleaning. You could eat off her floors. If only she cooked.

Instead of reacting with some form of empathy, the editors here questioned my stories' validity.

Certainly I must be taking some poetic license with stories about Mom, who I described as a shrinking redhead in fuzzy white slippers who used language that would make a sailor blush.

The consensus was that I had stretched the truth to make good copy.

OK. I had stretched the truth about Mom. She wasn't really shrinking. Just losing inches to age and a bad back.

Everything else I had even written about my Mom was true:

Her rent-controlled apartment with the uncontrollable thermostat that turned her place into a Russian sauna. We'd start stripping down to our underwear or collapse from the heat.

Her ability to weaken the most steadfast salesmen with guilt. The woman had a doctorate in Jewish guilt.

Her need to buy cross-training, shock-absorbing sneakers to walk in the snow ("What, I'm gonna wear bulky boots?") even though she never left her apartment in winter.

Her priceless (a polite way to say worthless) collection of tchotchkes, including a bobblehead hula dancer, ceramic planters and a 2-foot-high statue of a guy holding a birthday cake.

The editors here said no one could be as "original," as I portrayed Roz Lewis to be.

They wanted proof.

So several years ago, a reporter was assigned to travel down to Brooklyn and interview "Barry's Mom" for a Mother's Day feature.

The truth would come out.

After meeting with Mom, the reporter called me. To apologize. Seems I had sugar-coated my description of Mom.

Nothing more was said.

Mom got a kick out of that Mother's Day story — as she did all the stories about her. Never was ashamed. Would actually pass the columns around.

This week marks five years since my Mom died.

I find that harder to believe than her cooking.

I didn't make the trip to Brooklyn as often as I should have. Back then often felt like too much. It took her death to realize it really wasn't enough.

A lesson learned too late.

I'll make time to visit her this week. She'll be mad. It's been too long. She'll find a way to tell me.